Jakob Eduard Polak

Jakob Eduard Polak (1818 to 1891) was an Austrian physician born into a Jewish family from Bohemia who played an important part in bringing modern medicine to Iran. He studied medicine in Prague and Vienna and was one of six Austrian teachers invited by the chief minister Amir Kabir to staff Dar al-Fonun, the first modern institution of higher learning in Iran. He entered the country in November 1851 and taught medicine there until 1860. He began lecturing in French through a translator, but the translators proved so incompetent that he learned Persian in six months and then taught in that language. From 1855 to 1860 he served as personal physician to Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, and he was succeeded in that post by the French physician Joseph Desire Tholozan. His book Persien, das Land und seine Bewohner, published in Leipzig in 1865, is regarded as an outstanding ethnographic account of nineteenth century Iran, and he also published a Persian-language work titled Bimari i vaba. In 1885 he funded the Viennese botanist Otto Stapf on an expedition that found many new plant species. He died in 1891.